A reader of this site has emailed me to point out a post at Criminaljusticedegreesguide.com. The post, available here, is titled, “10 Literary Lawyers We Wish Were Real.” Here’s the list:
2. Rudy Baylor
3. Perry Mason
8. Wallace Stevens (a strange selection indeed, since Stevens was real, but the author has put an interesting twist on Stevens)
10. Jake Brigance
Readers should view the article to see why the (unnamed) author believes that these figures “should be real.”
The following essay originally appeared here at The Legendary (July 2010).
I am, at this writing, looking over a spider’s corpse, the little thing having spooked me into murder. It hurried across my papers at an alarming speed for so small a creature and then halted suddenly when I flinched and pushed my chair back from the desk. At this the miniature monster reared himself aloft, his front legs and chelicerae raised and ready for attack, his size strangely exaggerated. “This is ugly,” I gasped to no one in particular.
I’ve heard that spiders have thousands of eyes so it’s no wonder that the thing supposed me threatening. Heck, I was threatening, whether I was one or a thousand. I reached for my newspaper and, foregoing reflection, swatted the brittle beast over and over until its yellow guts, an oozy snot-like substance, spattered all over an otherwise unblemished copy of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. “Ugh,” I sighed, relieved and rubbing my sticky hands together, “that was ugly.”
Sometimes I short-circuit reflection, especially when, as then, an unusual thing startles me or otherwise makes me want to tell somebody something. What do I mean? I’m not sure exactly. I think I mean to say I’m a talker. It’s a terrible habit, this talking. And a nervous one too. Although Freud might disagree, today’s psychologists suggest that babble is a sign of egomania or a warped sense of prerogative. Folks back home simply refer to this as “diarrhea of the mouth.”
What a yucky, demented feeling I get when at dinner parties people glance around the room while I’m talking to them. They’re hoping, I know, that somebody will pass by and relieve them of their duties. “Oh, say, have you met Jonathan?” they’ll interject, grabbing poor Jonathan by the arm and stationing him in front of me. “Jonathan also went to law school. Y’all have something in common.”
I might have been relating the story of my religious conversion or of my struggle with cancer but my now-retreating listener wouldn’t even know. Why? Because I’ve chattered him out of caring. Now I’m standing there staring at an obviously uncomfortable Jonathan whose eyes scan the room for the nearest and next substitute. He seems ugly to me, and I to him. Read the rest of this entry »
It was customary practice in my family to gather at my grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner after church. Loyal to our Southern traditions, we would, after eating, divide company: men into the living room, women into the kitchen or den. My brother and I, still children, would sit silently, for the most part, while my grandfather, father and uncles bandied about the names of politicians and discussed the day’s sermon or newspaper headlines.
I first learned of William F. Buckley Jr. during these Sunday afternoons, as he was often the topic of conversation. I was too young to know much, but young enough to learn a lot quickly, so I began to follow this man, this Buckley, to the extent that I could, from those days until the day that he died in February 2008.
Overcommitted to supposedly universal political ideals and to the spread of American liberal democracy throughout the world, Buckley was not my kind of conservative. He could be tactless and cruel, as when he violated the ancient maxim de mortuis nil nisi bonum (“Of the dead, speak no evil”) in an obituary to Murray Rothbard wherein he wrote that “Rothbard had defective judgment” and “couldn’t handle moral priorities.” Buckley then trumpeted some unflattering anecdotes about Rothbard before likening Rothbard to David Koresh.
Despite such tantrums and vendettas, I always liked Buckley. Something in the way he conducted himself—his showy decorum, flaunted manners and sophisticated rhetoric—appealed to me.
Carl T. Bogus, an American law professor and author of the biography Buckley, seems to share my qualified respect for Buckley, despite disagreeing with Buckley on important political and theoretical issues. “I should tell the reader up front,” Bogus warns, “that I am a liberal and thus critical—in some instances, highly critical—of Buckley’s ideology.” Yet, adds Bogus, “I admire William F. Buckley Jr. enormously.”
Unlike bobble-headed television personalities and think tank sycophants, Bogus does justice to his subject, treating Buckley’s ideas evenhandedly on the grounds that he (Bogus) is “disheartened by the present state of partisan animosity,” one solution to which, he says, “is to take opposing ideas seriously.” Bogus not only takes Buckley’s ideas seriously, but credits them for changing America’s political realities. Read the rest of this entry »
This review originally appeared here at the Southern Literary Review.
Good histories don’t just tell stories; they make arguments. Robert Morgan’s arguments in Lions of the West, subtle though they are, run as follows: historians and storytellers cannot help but view dramatic shifts of history as products of the actions of famous individuals; nevertheless, what happens in the course of history is attributable to numerous common folk acting independently and with disparate motivations. Even the most comprehensive history cannot tell the stories of all these individuals, each of whom, in the narrative of the American West, could be numbered among the great “lions.”
“While it is understandable,” Morgan explains, “that we see history mostly in terms of the deeds of a few, our grasp of what actually happened will be flawed and limited if we do not consider the story of the almost invisible many who made the notable deeds possible, even inevitable.” Despite this claim, Morgan seems taken by the Great Man theory of history, and one of the epigrams to his book, which gets repeated in the Prologue, is Emerson’s remark that there is “properly no history; only biography.”
Morgan’s stated purpose is to “create a living sense of the westward expansion of the United States through brief biographies of some of the men involved.” In realizing this goal, he offers a nod to other popular historians and storytellers such as Joseph J. Ellis, Gordon S. Wood, and David McCullough. Each of these men writes histories free of the monotony and tendentious urgency of academic historians, yet each is also committed to facts and small details as indicia of greater narrative patterns.
Morgan admits, as he must, that Lions of the West is, at best, “only a partial story.” That’s not a shortcoming peculiar to Morgan’s narrative but a reality of human experience: all histories, like all memories, are partial. Morgan himself submits that “written history is distortion through selection,” and that by its nature “narrative can represent only by implication, explicit about some parts, suggesting the many.” No history could recount all the constituent parts that make up the whole; no history, in other words, could recreate the past. For that reason, an author’s values and priorities are reflected in the subjects he or she chooses to undertake.
Morgan’s values and priorities can be gleaned from his decision to profile ten individuals whose lives and toils characterize the American West in all its outlandishness and glory: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, John Chapman (“Johnny Appleseed”), David (“Davy”) Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams. Of these, all but Chapman and Adams maintained significant ties to the South or would have considered themselves, or by others would have been considered, Southerners. Read the rest of this entry »
The following book review originally appeared here in the Fall 2010 issue of The Independent Review.
Humans are not automated and predictable, but beautifully complex and spontaneous. History is not linear. Progress is not inevitable. Our world is strangely intertextual and multivocal. It is irreducible to trite summaries and easy answers, despite what our semiliterate politicians would have us believe. Thinking in terms of free-market economics allows us to appreciate the complicated dynamics of human behavior while making sense of the ambiguities leading to and following from that behavior. With these realities in mind, I applaud Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox for compiling the timely collection Literature and the Economics of Liberty, which places imaginative literature in conversation with Austrian economic theory.
Cantor and Cox celebrate the manifold intricacies of the market, which, contrary to popular opinion, is neither perfect nor evil, but a proven catalyst for social happiness and well-being. They do not recycle tired attacks on Marxist approaches to literature: they reject the “return to aesthetics” slogans of critics such as Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, and John M. Ellis, and they adopt the principles, insights, and paradigms of the Austrian school of economics. Nor do Cantor and Cox merely invert the privilege of the terms Marxist and capitalist (please excuse my resort to Derridean vocabulary), although they do suggest that one might easily turn “the tables on Marxism” by applying “its technique of ideology critique to socialist authors, questioning whether they have dubious motives for attacking capitalism.” Cantor and Cox are surprisingly the first critics to look to Austrian economics for literary purposes, and their groundbreaking efforts are sure to ruffle a few feathers—but also to reach audiences who otherwise might not have heard of Austrian economics.
Cantor and Cox submit that the Austrian school offers “the most humane form of economics we know, and the most philosophically informed.” They acknowledge that this school is heterodox and wide ranging, which, they say, are good things. By turning to economics in general, the various contributors to this book—five in all—suggest that literature is not created in a vacuum but rather informs and is informed by the so-called real world. By turning to Austrian economics in particular, the contributors seek to secure a place for freedom and liberty in the understanding of culture. The trouble with contemporary literary theory, for them, lies not with economic approaches, but with bad economic approaches. An economic methodology of literary theory is useful and incisive so long as it pivots on sound philosophies and not on obsolete or destructive ideologies. Austrian economics appreciates the complexity and nuance of human behavior. It avoids classifying individuals as cookiecutter caricatures. It champions a humane-economy counter to mechanistic massproduction, central planning, and collectivism. Marxism, in contrast, is collectivist, predictable, monolithic, impersonal, linear, reductive–in short, wholly inadequate as an instrument for good in an age in which, quite frankly, we know better than to reduce the variety of human experience to simplistic formulae. A person’s creative and intellectual energies are never completely products of culture or otherwise culturally underwritten. People are rational agents who choose between different courses of action based on their reason, knowledge, and experience. A person’s choices, for better or worse, affect lives, circumstances, and communities. (“Ideas have consequences,” as Richard Weaver famously remarked.) And communities themselves consist of multiplicities that defy simple labels. It is not insignificant, in light of these principles, that Michel Foucault late in his career instructed his students to read the collected works of Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Read the rest of this entry »
J. Neil Schulman is a novelist, actor, filmmaker, journalist, composer, and publisher. Among his many books are Alongside Night and The Rainbow Cadenza, both of which won the Prometheus Award. Visit his website at http://jneilschulman.rationalreview.com/.
The following interview originally appeared here at Prometheus Unbound: A Libertarian Review of Fiction and Literature.
AM: Right off the bat, it strikes me that I don’t know what to call you. Will Neil work?
JNS: Sure. It’s J. Neil Schulman in credits, and Neil in person.
AM: Anyway, thank you for doing this interview, Neil. You’ve had a fascinating and unique career. You’ve written novels, short fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and other works. Which of your works is your favorite and why?
JNS: Every artist gets asked this question sooner or later. I asked it of Robert A. Heinlein when I interviewed him in 1973, and his answer was, “The latest one I’ve been working on.”
I’ve only completed one movie so far — Lady Magdalene’s — so it’s a Hobson’s Choice on that one. Ask me again when I’ve made two! But a lot of people also seem to like the script I wrote for The Twilight Zone, “Profile in Silver.”
I’ve written three novels. My first, Alongside Night [editor's note: free in pdf], seems to be my most accessible and popular. I consider my second novel, The Rainbow Cadenza, to be my most layered, literary, and richest in explicit philosophy. My third novel, Escape from Heaven, is my favorite. It may not be as timely as my first novel or literary as my second novel, but it’s the one that’s closest to my heart…both the funniest thing I’ve ever written, and the one which is most deceptively simple. It appears to be a lightweight piece of comic fantasy, but it’s full of ideas that if examined more closely turn both traditional theology and rationalist philosophy on their heads.
Short stories? I’ll pick a few: “The Musician,” “Day of Atonement,” and “When Freemen Shall Stand” — all in my collection Nasty. Brutish, and Short Stories — and my latest short story, “The Laughskeller,” published on my blog, J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review.
AM: Your worldview is, in a word, libertarian. Why is that? How does libertarianism come across in your writing?
JNS: In my nonfiction essays it comes across explicitly. In fiction, drama, and comedy, I try to examine libertarian themes without preaching. I was probably most subtle doing this in The Rainbow Cadenza. The utilitarian politics advocated by the chief villain, Burke Filcher, is so self-consistent that a lot of readers have thought this character speaks for the author. In fact, I wrote the novel to attack utilitarianism as a nullification of the natural individual rights I believe in. The novel reduces utilitarianism to absurdity — it’s a formal satire of it.
Alongside Night is less subtle, though I’m probably more successful in the new movie script than the 1970s novel when it comes to letting the audience make up its own mind. I have learned some refinements of my craft in the last three decades.
AM: I recently noticed that you commented on a post at the Austrian Economics and Literature blog edited by my good friend Troy Camplin. Tell me about the influence that Austrian economics has had on you.
JNS: I would say that Austrian economics — and more fundamentally, the analytical tools of praxeology and games theory — have been fundamental to my work for my entire professional career. They’re not the only tools in my kit, but they get shopworn as much as any of them. Austrian economics is most explicit in Alongside Night, projecting the social and political consequences of fiat money hyperinflation — but I used games theory in plotting “Profile in Silver” and applied praxeology to the afterlife in Escape from Heaven. Read the rest of this entry »
James Banks is a doctoral student studying Renaissance and Restoration English literature at the University of Rochester. He also contributes to the American Interest Online. He has been a Fellow with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Honors Program; in addition to The Literary Lawyer, he has written for the Intercollegiate Review, First Principles and The Heritage Foundation’s blog The Foundry. A native of Idaho’s panhandle, he lives in upstate New York and serves in the New York Army National Guard.
Agrarianism has been an organized antagonist of American capitalism for longer than Marxism has, and it provides a welcome avenue for those who reject the gospel of a bourgeoisie paradise but are averse to the cosmopolitan and authoritarian tendencies of Marxism. It has occasionally found its way into public policy, such as the Second Bush Administration’s efforts to turn all Americans into property owners (though, by that point, “the family farm” had become a suburban home with a two car garage and white picket fence). Most recently, a debate boiled up in the blogosphere over a comment made by First Things editor Joe Carter arguing that Agrarianism was essentially utopian in nature.
Front Porch Republic—which, from what I can make out, is not explicitly Agrarian but is highly sympathetic to its tenets—was quick to come back with a number of repartees. Nonetheless, these repartees (for this reader anyway) only accentuated some of the problems with the ideology that they sought to defend. Front Porch Republic’s best contribution to the debate is Mark T. Mitchell’s. Professor Mitchell is an author of considerable ability and one who—in as far as I can make out—comes pretty close to living the philosophy that he advocates. I would not question the consistency of his views, just the correctness.
In his discussion of Wendell Berry’s Agrarianism, Mitchell writes:
The agrarian is guided by gratitude. He recognizes the giftedness of creation and accepts the great and awful responsibility to steward it well. Such a recognition “calls for prudence, humility, good work, propriety of scale.”[3] In the use of the land, soil, water, and non-human creatures, the final arbiter, according to Berry, is not human will but nature itself.[4] But this is not to suggest that Berry is some sort of pantheist. Instead, “the agrarian mind is, at bottom, a religious mind.” The agrarian recognizes that the natural world is a gift, and gifts imply a giver. “The agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking, good eating, and gratitude to God.” By contrast, the “industrial mind “begins with ingratitude, and ramifies in the destruction of farms and forests.”
I can sympathize with the desire to live close to the soil (and would purchase a farm could I afford it). The problem with the argument, though, is that it implies a fundamental distinction between the “agrarian mind” and the “industrial mind”; in truth, the difference between the two is one of degree rather than fundamental difference. Perhaps the agrarian mind “recognizes that the natural world is a gift,” but does it recognize it as such more than does the mind of the hunter/gatherer? And, if not, why should we not go further and work to incorporate elements of the hunter/gatherer’s economy into our postmodern existence? Read the rest of this entry »
The Seventh Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society will take place in Bodrum, Turkey, at the Hotel Karia Princess, from Thursday, September 27, through Monday, October 1, 2012. Readers of this site may be interested in some of the proposed talks for this event.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Stephan Kinsella will speak on Philosophy and Law. Professor Hoppe’s paper is titled “The Nature of Man: Does Any Such Thing Exist?” Mr. Kinsella’s paper is titled “The Market for Law.”
Sean Gabb and Benjamin Marks will speak on Literature and Literary Criticism. Dr. Gabb’s paper is titled ”On Literature and Liberty.” Mr. Marks’s paper is titled “On H. L. Mencken as a Libertarian Model (and Some Romantic Libertarian Delusions).”
Other literati to speak include Jeffery Tucker, who interviewed me about literature and the economics of liberty and who now is the executive editor for Laissez Faire Books, and Theodore Dalrymple.
Last spring I learned that I had been assigned to teach a freshman writing course on sustainability. I don’t know much about sustainability, at least not in the currently popular sense of that term, and for many other reasons I was not thrilled about having to teach this course. So I decided to put a spin on the subject. What follows is an abridged version of my syllabus. I owe more than a little gratitude to John Hasnas for the sections called “The Classroom Experience,” “Present and Prepared Policy,” and “Ground Rules for Discussion.” He created these policies, and, with a few exceptions, the language from these policies is taken from a syllabus he provided during a workshop at a July 2011 Institute for Humane Studies conference on teaching and pedagogy.
Sustainability and American Communities
What is sustainability? You have registered for this course about sustainability, so presumably you have some notion of what sustainability means. The Oxford English Dictionary treats “sustainability” as a derivative of “sustainable,” which is defined as
Recently, though, sustainability has become associated with ecology and the environment. The OED dates this development as beginning in 1980 and trending during the 1990s. The OED also defines “sustainability” in the ecological context as follows: “Of, relating to, or designating forms of human economic activity and culture that do not lead to environmental degradation, esp. avoiding the long-term depletion of natural resources.” With this definition in mind, we will examine landmark American authors and texts and discuss their relationship to sustainability. You will read William Bartram, Thomas Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Mark Twain, and others. Our readings will address nature, community, place, stewardship, husbandry, and other concepts related to sustainability. By the end of the course, you will have refined your understanding of sustainability through the study of literary texts.
Course Objectives
I have designed this course to help you improve your reading, writing, and thinking skills. In this course, you will learn to write prose for general, academic, and professional audiences. ENGL 1120 is a writing course, not a lecture course. Plan to work on your writing every night. You will have writing assignments every week. Read the rest of this entry »
Joyce Corrington, a long-term friend and supporter of this site whose interview with me appeared back in September, recently republished, in e-book format, the four New Orleans mysteries she wrote in a series with her late husband John William Corrington. The books are available at the following links:
Joyce’s latest novel, Fear of Dying, the fifth in the series, came out in 2011.
